What makes a good project management tool? A project management tool should have the ability to:
- Plan the work
- Track the work
- Complete the work
- Report on the work
The issue with most of the tools I've used in the past has been that when the tool isn't easy, it isn't used. The tool needs to support both the methodology of the project as well as support the team members on the project. If the tool interferes with progress, the tool becomes a burden rather than a tool. If you have to carry around a sledge hammer to pound nails into a board, you're going to avoid pounding nails.
Here are some of the details for my idea of the holy grail of project management tools.
- Manager can assign work to team members.
- Team members can create their own work lists or to-do lists to accomplish a task.
- Team members tie their time back to tasks.
- Team members can track both billable and non-billable work without creating non-billable buckets for time.
- Estimate work for each task and define timelines and budgets
- Report on time by task, totaled by project, totaled by customer, totaled by team member
- Report progress on a project by reviewing completed tasks over a time period (the past week, or the past month).
I'm in the process of reviewing a number of "Web 2.0" applications. I'll use this blog post to document my thoughts on each.
ClockingIT: http://www.clockingit.com/
- Cost: free (For now)
- Hosted or Installed (under the MIT/X Consortium License)
- Allows for Clients>Projects>Milestones>Tasks>To-dos
- I like this level of hierarchy
- Can track time directly to a task - both with a stopwatch and retrospectively in blocks of time
- Time tracked to tasks which are tied to projects
- Does not allow you to mark time as non-billable
- Allows you to report
- Timesheets - by client, project and/or user
- Export task lists, and time logs to CSV
- Lots of custom reports, custom views, custom dashboards
BaseCamp: http://www.basecamphq.com/index
- Cost: $149/mo to get time tracking and unlimited projects/users/clients
- Hosted
- Allows for Clients>Projects>Milstones>To-dos
- To do lists make up tasks for a project
- The organization of projects by Client looks cleaner than ClockingIT
- Time Tracking can be tied to to-do items or jsut as a log
- I don't like that the time is separate from the work defined in planning a project
- Report on time by project or by user over timelines. Can you report by client?
- Can export time to CSV
- More based on projects - overview, messages, to-dos, milestones, time are all contained in a single project. This is good because it prevents the lure of "multi-tasking"
ActiveCollab: http://www.activecollab.com/features/
- Cost: $399 perpetual
- Installed - PHP, MySQL
- Time tracking - billable and non-billable and tied to a project
- Each project consists of checklists which are made of tasks.
- Time can be logged to a task in a check list
- Time can be marked as billed if you're using the tool with invoicing
- Heavily AJAXy and in Chrome some of the buttons don't line up - this adds to the overall feel which I just don't like as much as the other systems
Tick: http://www.tickspot.com/
- Cost: $79/month
- Hosted
- Primarily a time tracking function
- Allows you to set budgets in time or $$ (with $$ tied to users' hourly rate)
- Integrates with Basecamp to accomplish more project management functions
Freckle: http://letsfreckle.com/
- Cost: $98/month - 25 users
- Hosted
- The tour is a little limited, but it looks primarily geared toward logging time to a project.
- Can easily capture unbillable time by adding an * to each entry
- Strightforward and simple UI - How long, for whom, doing what...
- Con configure budgets for projects
Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management 2007
- Reviewing the Project Web Access
- The demo I signed up for was too bug-ridden to evaluate the software. I think this is definately the sledge hammer of Project Management tools
- One thing I did love about this is the project manager can define and schedule status report that are collected by the Project Web Access